Yoko Ono: John Lennon Would Have Loved Technology; Says Criticism Was Good for Her

Facebook.com/YokoOnoPage -- Yoko Ono says John Lennon would have loved the kind of interconnected, interactive communications the Internet era allows. The widow of the Beatles legend tells Rolling Stone,"John would have been totally excited about the computer age."

Recalling her own Smile Project -- which began in 1967 with the idea of making a film of snapshots of every person on Earth smiling, and was launched instead as a mobile app this year -- Ono says, "That's the kind of thing that [he] and I were dreaming of."

Ono, whose first album since 2009, Take Me to the Land of Hell, is due next Tuesday, says that although she and Lennon got a lot of criticism in the 1960s for some of their activism, the criticism turned out to be a good thing, keeping the pair moving. "When we did a bed-in, we got very bad reviews," Ono says. "They didn't like it -- OK, we had to move on....I would never have done all the other things."

The 80-year-old says the same thing goes when it comes to critics of her music. "It's good that I was not a critics' choice, and the critics saying 'Oh, this is great -- oh, keep on doing that forever!'" she says. "It wasn't like that. It was great."